Baseball: Frustrating loss proves these Red Sox may be finished

Sunday

Jul 6, 2014 at 9:50 PMJul 7, 2014 at 6:37 PM

By Bill Ballou TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

BOSTON — The worst part of a once-in-a-lifetime achievement is that it's an impossible act to follow.

This is what Ben Cherington faces in the final three months of this enormously disappointing baseball season. He remade the Red Sox and built the foundation for the greatest turnaround in the game's history with one trade in August 2012. That was Cherington's once-in-a-lifetime moment.

This rebuilding of the Red Sox will have to be more traditional. There does not seem to be any magic pill to cure this ailment, no surgical procedure to remove the gangrenous tissue, no bull's-eye managerial target like Bobby Valentine.

Sunday's 7-6 loss to the Orioles at Fenway Park, as desultory as it was, has to have served a purpose. This particular Red Sox team is baked, cooked, barbecued, fricasseed, double-boiled, deep-fried, braised and seared.

They are born to lose, as Sunday proved. They came back from a 6-1 deficit with five runs in the seventh, then could not finish the job and lost in 12 innings, an outcome that seemed guaranteed when John Farrell had to use Edward Mujica in a close game.

He got the loss, of course, and is 2-4. Two of the Sox veterans ran into stupid outs on the bases — Dustin Pedroia with an attempted steal in the ninth and David Ortiz with an attempted double in the 12th that became a single and an out after 120 feet.

"We're always going to error on the side of aggressiveness," Farrell said in defense of his veterans, "but our success rate needs to improve."

The Red Sox are 1-5 on the homestand that was supposed to get them back in the race.

The schedule is not over, but the season is. Boston is nine games out of first place — forget the wild-card calculations — and 10 games below .500 with 74 to play. The Athletics and Cubs officially declared Yard Sale Season to be open, so Cherington has to consider what to haul out to Fenway's front lawn.

Jonny Gomes, Jake Peavy, Felix Doubront, Clay Buchholz — they might bring some interest — but the Red Sox have underachieved so badly that it would not be surprising if the only player anybody was interested in was Jonathan Herrera.

Time is the Red Sox' enemy even more than the deficit. While teams have been deeper in the red than the 2014 Red Sox and come back to make the playoffs, advance to the World Series, or even win the World Series, none of them were as bad as this year's Sox this deep into the season.

Last year's Dodgers are the most recent team to go from bad to very good in the middle of a season.

Los Angeles was 12 games under .500 at 30-42 (.417) on June 21 and went 62-28 (.689) the rest of the way to win the NL West. The Dodgers' surge began two weeks after they brought up Yasiel Puig from the minors. LA later added Ricky Nolasco to the starting rotation, but Puig was clearly the catalyst for the turnaround.

Brock Holt has helped, but he's no Puig.

The only time the Astros made it to the World Series was in 2005, and they were 26-38 on June 15. Houston didn't fire Phil Garner or make any major personnel changes. The Astros just started winning more often than they lost, and it added up, just barely, to a playoff berth.

While the 1978 Yankees made up a 14-game deficit to win the AL East in a playoff game against Boston, New York was a good team that got really hot. The Yanks' low point that season was 47-42 on July 17.

The Morgan's Magic Red Sox made up a nine-game deficit in 1988 by going 19-1 after John McNamara was fired in favor of Joe Morgan, but that team was a game over .500 when the change was made.

The 1967 Impossible Dream Sox were memorably, "At the All-Star break, for heaven's sake, just six games from the lead," but they were also over .500 then.

Probably the team most comparable to this one was Morgan's 1991 club. It was the defending AL East champion, but was only 50-57 and 11½ games out of first place on the night of Aug. 7. Those Sox then went 31-10 in their next 41 games and got as close as a half-game out of first before fading.

It was sort of like Sunday. All that work to catch up and, in the end, nothing to show for it. Games like that happen, and so do seasons. That's why it is time to write off 2014 as having any future for the Red Sox.

Contact Bill Ballou at wballou@telegram.com.

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